Download or read book Becoming the People of the Talmud written by Talya Fishman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Becoming the People of the Talmud, Talya Fishman examines ways in which circumstances of transmission have shaped the cultural meaning of Jewish traditions. Although the Talmud's preeminence in Jewish study and its determining role in Jewish practice are generally taken for granted, Fishman contends that these roles were not solidified until the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The inscription of Talmud—which Sefardi Jews understand to have occurred quite early, and Ashkenazi Jews only later—precipitated these developments. The encounter with Oral Torah as a written corpus was transformative for both subcultures, and it shaped the roles that Talmud came to play in Jewish life. What were the historical circumstances that led to the inscription of Oral Torah in medieval Europe? How did this body of ancient rabbinic traditions, replete with legal controversies and nonlegal material, come to be construed as a reference work and prescriptive guide to Jewish life? Connecting insights from geonica, medieval Jewish and Christian history, and orality-textuality studies, Becoming the People of the Talmud reconstructs the process of cultural transformation that occurred once medieval Jews encountered the Babylonian Talmud as a written text. According to Fishman, the ascription of greater authority to written text was accompanied by changes in reading habits, compositional predilections, classroom practices, approaches to adjudication, assessments of the past, and social hierarchies. She contends that certain medieval Jews were aware of these changes: some noted that books had replaced teachers; others protested the elevation of Talmud-centered erudition and casuistic virtuosity into standards of religious excellence, at the expense of spiritual refinement. The book concludes with a consideration of Rhineland Pietism's emergence in this context and suggests that two contemporaneous phenomena—the prominence of custom in medieval Ashkenazi culture and the novel Christian attack on Talmud—were indirectly linked to the new eminence of this written text in Jewish life.
Download or read book A Common Justice written by Uriel I. Simonsohn and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-09-07 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Common Justice Uriel I. Simonsohn examines the legislative response of Christian and Jewish religious elites to the problem posed by the appeal of their coreligionists to judicial authorities outside their communities. Focusing on the late seventh to early eleventh centuries in the region between Iraq in the east and present-day Tunisia in the west, Simonsohn explores the multiplicity of judicial systems that coexisted under early Islam to reveal a complex array of social obligations that connected individuals across confessional boundaries. By examining the incentives for appeal to external judicial institutions on the one hand and the response of minority confessional elites on the other, the study fundamentally alters our conception of the social history of the Near East in the early Islamic period. Contrary to the prevalent scholarly notion of a rigid social setting strictly demarcated along confessional lines, Simonsohn's comparative study of Christian and Jewish legal behavior under early Muslim rule exposes a considerable degree of fluidity across communal boundaries. This seeming disregard for religious affiliations threatened to undermine the position of traditional religious elites; in response, they acted vigorously to reinforce communal boundaries, censuring recourse to external judicial institutions and even threatening transgressors with excommunication.
Download or read book The Majlis written by Hava Lazarus-Yafeh and published by Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. This book was released on 1999 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with a well-known and widespread phenomenon in medieval Islam which has not been studied in detail. The Majlis (pl. Majalis) is a forum devoted to interreligious polemics, as well as to the discussion of a variety of other topics. The concept and practise of the Majlis are examined from different angles by ten scholars. approach (H. Kuhne).
Download or read book Rabbis Language and Translation in Late Antiquity written by Willem F. Smelik and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exposed to multiple languages as a result of annexation, migration, pilgrimage and its position on key trade routes, the Roman Palestine of Late Antiquity was a border area where Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic dialects were all in common use. This study analyses the way scriptural translation was perceived and practised by the rabbinic movement in this multilingual world. Drawing on a wide range of classical rabbinic sources, including unused manuscript materials, Willem F. Smelik traces developments in rabbinic thought and argues that foreign languages were deemed highly valuable for the lexical and semantic light they shed on the meanings of lexemes in the holy tongue. Key themes, such as the reception of translations of the Hebrew Scriptures, multilingualism in society, and rabbinic rules for translation, are discussed at length. This book will be invaluable for students of ancient Judaism, rabbinic studies, Old Testament studies, early Christianity and translation studies.
Download or read book Jews in Early Christian Law written by John Victor Tolan and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2014 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the place of Jews in medieval Christian societies? in the ninetheenth and early twentieth centuries, this question was largely confined to Jewish scholars, and the academic debates where inseparable from the upheavels of the lives of contemporary European Jews.
Download or read book How Do We Know This written by Jay M. Harris and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of rabbinic legal interpretation (midrash) in Judaisms rabbinic, medieval, and modern periods. It shows how the rise of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism in the modern period is tied to distinct attitudes toward the classical Jewish heritage, and specifically, toward rabbinic midrash halakah.
Download or read book The Legal Status of D imm s in the Islamic West written by María Isabel Fierro and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first monograph devoted to the legal status of religious minorities status accorded to dimmī-s ( Jews and Christians) in the Muslim law in the medieval Muslim west (the Maghreb and Muslim Spain). The articles in this volume provide numerous examples of the richness and complexity of interreligious relations in Medieval Islam and the reactions of jurists to those relations. The studies brought together in this volume provide an important contribution to the history of ḏimmī-s in the medieval dār al-islām, and more generally to the legal history of religious minorities in medieval societies. The central question addressed is the legal status accorded to ḏimmī-s (Jews and Christians) in the Muslim law in the medieval Muslim west (the Maghreb and Muslim Spain). The scholars whose work is brought together in these pages have dealt with a rich and complex variety of legal sources. Many of the texts are from the Mālikī legal tradition; they include fiqh, fatwā-s, ḥisba manuals. These texts function as the building blocks of the legal framework in which jurists and rulers of Maghrebi and Peninsular societies worked. The very richness and complexity of these texts, as well as the variety of responses that they solicited, refute the textbook idea of a monolithic ḏimmī system, supposedly based on the Pact of 'Umar, applied throughout the Muslim world. In fact when one looks closely at the early legal texts or chronicles from both the Mashreq and the Maghreb, there is little evidence for a standard, uniform ḏimmī system, but rather a wide variety of local adaptations. The articles in this volume provide numerous examples of the richness and complexity of interreligious relations in Medieval Islam and the reactions of jurists to those relations
Download or read book The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud written by David Weiss Halivni and published by . This book was released on 2013-09-19 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeffrey L. Rubenstein offers a translation from the Hebrew of The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud by David Weiss Halivni. Halivni's work is widely regarded as the most comprehensive scholarly examination of the processes of composition and editing of the Babylonian Talmud. Halivni presents the summation of a lifetime of scholarship and the conclusions of his multivolume Talmudic commentary, Sources and Traditions (Meqorot umesorot). Arguing against the traditional view that the Talmud was composed c. 450 CE by the last of the named sages in the Talmud, the Amoraim, Halivni proposes that its formation took place over a much longer period of time, not reaching its final form until about 750 CE. The Talmud consists of many literary strata or layers, with later layers constantly commenting upon and reinterpreting earlier layers. The later layers differ qualitatively from the earlier layers, and were composed by anonymous sages whom Halivni calls Stammaim. These sages were the true author-editors of the Talmud, who reconstructed the reasons underpinning earlier rulings, created the dialectical argumentation characteristic of the Talmud, and formulated the literary units that make up the Talmudic text. Halivni also discusses the history and development of rabbinic tradition from the Mishnah through the post-Talmud legal codes, the types of dialectical analysis found in the different rabbinic works, and the roles of reciters, transmitters, compilers, and editors in the composition of the Talmud. This volume contains an introduction and annotations by Jeffrey Rubenstein.
Download or read book The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture written by Robert Brody and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Geonic period from about the late sixth to mid-eleventh centuries is of crucial importance in the history of Judaism. The Geonim, for whom this era is named, were the heads of the ancient talmudic academies of Babylonia. They gained ascendancy over the older Palestinian center of Judaism and were recognized as the leading religious and spiritual authorities by most of the world's Jewish population. The Geonim and their circles enshrined the Babylonian Talmud as the central canonical work of rabbinic literature and the leading guide to religious practice, and it was a predominantly Babylonian version of Judaism that was transplanted to newer centers of Judaism in North Africa and Europe. Robert Brody's book -- the first survey in English of the Geonic period in almost a century -focuses on the cultural milieu of the Geonim and on their intellectual and literary creativity. Brody describes the cultural spheres in which the Geonim were active and the historical and cultural settings within which they functioned. He emphasizes the challenges presented by other Jewish institutions and individuals, ranging from those within the Babylonian Jewish setting -- specially the political leadership represented by the Exilarch -- to the competing Palestinian Jewish center and to sectarian movements and freethinkers who rejected rabbinic authority altogether. He also describes the variety of ways in which the development of Geonic tradition was affected by the surrounding non-Jewish cultures, both Muslim and Christian. "This book is a fresh and thorough examination of the period in question, a masterpiece of scholarship and erudition". -- Neil Danzig, Jewish Theological Seminary
Download or read book Am Ha aretz written by Aʻharon Oppenheimer and published by Brill Archive. This book was released on 1977-01-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How the Bible Became Holy written by Michael L Satlow and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sweeping narrative, Michael Satlow tells the fascinating story of how an ancient collection of obscure Israelite writings became the founding texts of both Judaism and Christianity, considered holy by followers of each faith. Drawing on cutting-edge historical and archeological research, he traces the story of how, when, and why Jews and Christians gradually granted authority to texts that had long lay dormant in a dusty temple archive. The Bible, Satlow maintains, was not the consecrated book it is now until quite late in its history. He describes how elite scribes in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E. began the process that led to the creation of several of our biblical texts. It was not until these were translated into Greek in Egypt in the second century B.C.E., however, that some Jews began to see them as culturally authoritative, comparable to Homer’s works in contemporary Greek society. Then, in the first century B.C.E. in Israel, political machinations resulted in the Sadducees assigning legal power to the writings. We see how the world Jesus was born into was largely biblically illiterate and how he knew very little about the texts upon which his apostles would base his spiritual leadership. Synthesizing an enormous body of scholarly work, Satlow’s groundbreaking study offers provocative new assertions about commonly accepted interpretations of biblical history as well as a unique window into how two of the world’s great faiths came into being.
Download or read book Peshat and Derash written by David Weiss Halivni and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-09-03 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the days of Plato, the problem of the efficacy and adequacy of the written word as a vehicle of human communication has challenged mankind, yet the mystery of how best to achieve clarity and exactitude of written expression has never been solved. The most repercussive instance of this universal problem has been the exegesis of the law embodied in Hebrew scripture. Peshat and Derash is the first book to trace the Jewish interpretative enterprise from a historical perspective. Applying his vast knowledge of Rabbinic materials to the long history of Jewish exegesis of both Bible and Talmud, Halivni investigates the tension that has often existed between the plain sense of the divine text (peshat) and its creative, Rabbinic interpretations (derash). Halivni addresses the theological implications of the deviation of derash from peshat and explores the differences between the ideological extreme of the religious right, which denies that Judaism has a history, and the religious left, which claims that history is all that Judaism has. A comprehensive and critical narration of the history and repercussions of Rabbinic exegesis, this analysis will interest students of legal texts, hermeneutics, and scriptural traditions, as well as anyone involved in Jewish studies.
Download or read book Rabbinic Essays written by Jacob Zallel Lauterbach and published by . This book was released on 1951 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Heresy and the Politics of Community written by Marina Rustow and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-03 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a book with a bold new view of medieval Jewish history, written in a style accessible to nonspecialists and students as well as to scholars in the field, Marina Rustow changes our understanding of the origins and nature of heresy itself. Scholars have long believed that the Rabbanites and Qaraites, the two major Jewish groups under Islamic rule, split decisively in the tenth century and from that time forward the minority Qaraites were deemed a heretical sect. Qaraites affirmed a right to decide matters of Jewish law free from centuries of rabbinic interpretation; the Rabbanites, in turn, claimed an unbroken chain of scholarly tradition. Rustow draws heavily on the Cairo Geniza, a repository of papers found in a Rabbanite synagogue, to show that despite the often fierce arguments between the groups, they depended on each other for political and financial support and cooperated in both public and private life. This evidence of remarkable interchange leads Rustow to the conclusion that the accusation of heresy appeared sporadically, in specific contexts, and that the history of permanent schism was the invention of polemicists on both sides. Power shifted back and forth fluidly across what later commentators, particularly those invested in the rabbinic claim to exclusive authority, deemed to have been sharply drawn boundaries. Heresy and the Politics of Community paints a portrait of a more flexible medieval Eastern Mediterranean world than has previously been imagined and demonstrates a new understanding of the historical meanings of charges of heresy against communities of faith. Historians of premodern societies will find that, in her fresh approach to medieval Jewish and Islamic culture, Rustow illuminates a major issue in the history of religions.
Download or read book Homer and the Bible in the Eyes of Ancient Interpreters written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thus far intepretations of Homer and the Bible have largely been studied in isolation even though both texts became foundational for Western civilisation and were often commented upon in the same cultural context. The present collection of articles redresses this imbalance by bringing together scholars from different fields and offering prioneering essays, which cross traditional boundaries and interpret Biblical and Homeric interpreters in light of each other. The picture which emerges from these studies in highly complex: Greek, Jewish and Christian readers were concerned with similar literary and religious questions, often defining their own position in dialogue with others. Special attention is given to three central corpora: the Alexandrian scholia, Philo, Platonic writers of the Imperial Age, rabbinic exegesis.
Download or read book Heavenly Torah written by Abraham Joshua Heschel and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 876 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: his most ambitious scholarly achievement, his three-volume study of Rabbinic Judaism, is only now appearing in English.
Download or read book Authoritative Scriptures in Ancient Judaism written by Mladen Popović and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-06-14 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many scholars of the Second Temple period have replaced the concept of canonization by that of canonical process. Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been crucial for this new direction. Based on this new evidence taxonomic terms like biblical, nonbiblical or parabiblical seem anachronistic for the period before 70 C.E. The notion of authoritative Scriptures plays an important part in the new paradigm of canonical process, but it has not yet been sufficiently reflected upon and is in need of clarification. Why were some texts more authoritative than others? For whom and in what contexts were texts authoritative? And what are our criteria to determine to what extent a text was authoritative? In short, what do we mean by “authoritative”? This volume focuses on specific texts or corpora of texts, and approaches the notion of authoritative Scriptures from sociological, cultural and literary perspectives.
